making space for creativity
Dignity in motherhood can be hard to find. I clearly remember leaving a well-baby check-up for my fairly small baby daughter with myself covered in that mustard-brown baby poop of a nursing baby. Of course, she was in a new diaper and a fresh set of clothes because I had brought those with us, but…
Sweet Lily is 11 weeks old, and I am happy to say that we are adjusting well to being a family of four. For so much of Jackson’s infancy I could not imagine how I could do an infant and a toddler at once, but somehow we are doing it. As I reflect back…
Our little Lily arrived at 6:30 pm right smack on her due date May 12th. This was especially awesome since beginning at 37 weeks my blood pressure started to inch up, and words like preeclampsia and gestational hypertension started floating around my doctor’s office, both of which could mean, besides the obvious health risks,…
I love baby things. I love how cute they are. I love how you can imagine your own sweet baby using each item. I love looking at people’s lists of baby gear. For years before I had my own baby, I kept an amazon baby registry, and every time I ran into a cool…
In the bleary few weeks of new motherhood, I have had a number of friends quietly comment that they wished that they had not just read about pregnancy and birth but also read a lot more about breastfeeding. Postpartum can be a bit of a surprise in terms of just how immediately and unceasingly…
For many years I have loved reading books and blogs about babies and birth. Long before I was pregnant, or even trying to become pregnant, I have had a strange proclivity to peruse the 618 & 649 sections of the library, bringing home books on colic, toddler boundaries, and baby brain development, long before I…
Right in between Christmas day and my birthday, there quietly passed the one month mark of having little baby Jackson here with us. We spent the day sleeping and eating, crying and gazing, getting clean and messy again. Which is basically exactly what’s been going on all month. In fact, the month sort…
Our long awaited baby arrived in the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning! Tuesday evening, two days past my due date, I felt the familiar tight contractions that had been coming and going, and getting gradually stronger throughout the dark November evenings. It was the night before my husband Evan’s Thanksgiving break, and we watched The…
A few weeks ago I got a call from my doctor that a routine prenatal screening had turned something up. I had an asymptomatic GBS UTI (a bladder infection caused by Beta Strep that wasn’t causing me any discomfort). In the world of getting news from your doctor about a prenatal screening red flag,…
In the early weeks of being pregnant, I didn’t give much thought to maternity clothes. I was consumed with just the new, frightening, wonderful, exhausting possibility of motherhood. As far as I thought about clothes, I think I figured that I wore pretty stretchy clothes, so I probably could get away with those. …
I’m nearing the end of my second trimester now, but during my first trimester, in a very unscientific survey (in which I googled “paleo” and “pregnancy”), I found two common themes. Number One, the paleo pregnancy panacea, in which said woman felt awesome all the way through her pregnancy via eating paleo, no morning…